2θ6

Michael Kulikowski

literature with the sole and partial exception of Theophylact Simocatta. In fact, Mala-
las extends his folkloric approach to explanation into textually-derived contexts to
which they are generically alien.15 All other extant Byzantine histories share Malalas’
penchant for anecdote and character-driven explanation, of which he provides the
first extant example in Greek. Some of the stories contained in the tradition overlap,
and the technique is common to them all. This is not the place to attempt it, but a
pressing desideratum in Byzantine studies must be detailed Quellenforschung into this
literary phenomenon. It is text-driven despite the spurious ‘feel’ of orality that their
folkloric (or romantic) quality conveys.16 The utility of the exercise would not just be
to identify earlier lost works, as Bleckmann was able to do with reference to Zonaras
and Cedrenus, but to uncover relationships among the extant and lost historians.17 If
the exercise proves that it is possible to generate a stemma for the anecdotal topoi in
the historians whose text parallels Malalas and one another, that will demonstrate a
traceable, and historically legible, textual transmission - and thus something valuable
about Byzantine historiography that is by no means yet certain. If, however, it proves
impossible to create stemmata, that will mean that the topoi and folkloric anecdotes so
frequent in post-Malalan Greek historiography are commonplaces, circulating in such
numbers and in so many divergent forms, that they were available to Byzantine his-
torians without the need for a direct textual model.18 The latter is a priori more likely,
given the state of the evidence, but proving the a priori inference incorrect would
be revelatory.19 Equally revelatory, though more analytically problematic, would be a
demonstration that we were working with combination of two modes of transmission
of topoi: immediate author-to-author transmission in the manner of Zosimus with
Eunapius (and almost certainly of Malalas with Domninus),20 but also creative rewrit-
ing and the insertion of topoi from one narrative location or setting to another. The
point of such an exercise would be to locate Malalas more comprehensibly in a literary
time and place: was he a provincial outlier as has so often been suggested, or rather the
starting point for a habit of historical composition that conceived the imperial past
in new and non-Classical ways that were becoming normative from the sixth century
onwards? If one could show that Malalas is working with anecdotal/folkloric material
that was widely diffused, that would shed considerable light on his use of sources.
15 See Bernardi/Caire (2016), pp. 126-129 for examples.
16 The same point has been definitively proved for Latin literature of the period by Murray (1998).
17 See Bleckmann (1992) for a lost fourth-century history running down to Julian or Jovian and not iden-
tical with Eunapius; but note that this absolutely cannot be a Latin history or have anything to do with
the spectral^»»«/« of Nicomachus Flavianus, as maintained in scores of Historiae Augustae Colloquia
and carried ad absurdum by Ratti (2016).
18 That is a fundamental characteristic of living texts more generally.
19 One of the great difficulties in moving from a priori conjecture to demonstration is the fact that so few
of the major Byzantine breviaria - Zonaras most of all - are available in modern critical editions. Even
for its time, the Bonn corpus {Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae) was not at the cutting edge of
textual criticism, and yet we still rely on it for so much of our knowledge of Middle and Later Byzantine
texts.
20 Jeffreys (1990a), pp. 178-179.